ST. PAUL - Robert BaZan lives under the radar in a stretch of ruddy brick apartments here, organizing rallies and writing articles on behalf of the Karen independence movement in his native Myanmar.

For three decades, he fought in a guerrilla war in the country also known as Burma, then gave it up and moved to the American Midwest in what he called "a change of strategy." Karen rebels have been fighting for autonomy in eastern Myanmar - whose military government has drawn harsh criticism from the United States - for a half-century in one of the longest-running insurgencies in the world.

"We Karen want to raise awareness around the world about what is happening, while the guerrillas do the fighting," BaZan said. "We're combining our forces."

He added: "We can do things from here."

BaZan's long-distance activism might seem unusual, if not quixotic. But the 64-year-old is just one of several political and cultural leaders who have pursued an array of international causes from their exile outpost in Minnesota.

These refugee elites include college professors from Africa and the Middle East, a general who led Hmong forces during the Vietnam War, former prime ministers of Somali interim governments and a leading Liberian dissident who is now his country's new labor minister. One businessman from the Twin Cities who fled Yugoslavia as a dissident decades ago now serves on a city council in Croatia.

A variety of factors has led them to Minnesota, including an effective resettlement program - the Somali and Hmong populations are the largest in the country - a collection of colleges and universities in the Twin Cities and a strong economy. Their work has resulted in a refugee population energized by volatile political movements far from Minnesota.

Earlier this month, St. Paul resident Samuel Kofi Woods, a human rights activist, was chosen to be labor minister by Liberia's new president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Woods fled Liberia for Minnesota in 1998, then kept up his activism, most recently traveling to refugee camps in Liberia's border states.